A fire has destroyed the country cottage where Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the former Soviet dissident, wrote some of his most famous works and stored part of his family's archive.

The dacha near the village of Rodzhestvo, outside Moscow, was acquired by Solzhenitsyn in 1965. The dissident retreated there after his expulsion from the Soviet Union Of Writers and wrote the seminal account of his time in the Soviet prison camps system, The Gulag Archipelago. Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel prize for literature in 1970 and returned to post-Soviet Russia in 1994 after 20 years' exile.

An official at the local fire department said the dacha burned down on Wednesday night. The newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets said it was being rented by a Georgian man and that faulty electrics had sparked the blaze. It was unclear how much of the writer's old papers remained there, although the newspaper said there were rare photographs and writings about the writer's life.

The dacha was caught up in the tumultuous relationship between the writer and his ex-wife Natalya Reshetovskaya, who died two years ago aged 84.

Soon after they married in 1940 Solzhenitsyn was sent to the front and then to the Gulag. He urged her to carry on with her life and the couple were divorced. Ms Reshetovskaya later married a fellow scientist, Vsevolod Somov.

Solzhenitsyn is said to have sent her a poem that read: "At midnight, hiding my lips in a glass/ I whisper incomprehensibly to others/ 'My love, we have waited a long time!'. She replied, telling him for the first time about her plans to remarry: "I was created to love you alone, but fate decreed otherwise."

On Solzhenitsyn's release from prison, they remarried but that ended when the writer had an affair with a student. As the marriage fell apart, Ms Reshetovskaya was said to have planned to throw herself under a train, leaving her husband a note in blood. When the pair divorced for the second time in 1972, Ms Reshetovskaya said she took a picture of them together and buried it in the dacha's garden, making a symbolic grave for their relationship. Solzhenitsyn was later said to have unearthed the picture.

Two years later, Ms Reshetovskaya was asked by the KGB to persuade the writer not to publish The Gulag Archipelago.

Ms Reshetovskaya and a journalist, Nikolai Ledovskikh, had planned to open a museum to the writer's work and life in the dacha, and since her death the home had passed into Ledovskikh's hands.